Review: In This ‘Comedy of Errors,’ Shakespeare Gets a Jersey Accent

LENOX, Mass. — She is a magnificent specimen: the hair big and honey blond, the clothes snug and revealing, the jewelry copious and gold. Meticulously manicured, stalking around in screaming-orange sandals with wedge heels that would maim a weaker woman, the aggrieved Adriana is pure Jersey girl — the stereotypical variety.

She is also a hilariously high-strung delight to behold in Taibi Magar’s effervescent staging of “The Comedy of Errors” here at Shakespeare & Company, where Kelley Curran unapologetically steals the show with an Adriana who is all defiant posing and tangy Garden State vowels.

Yes, yes, Shakespeare’s “The Comedy of Errors” is the mistaken-identity farce about the two almost indistinguishably named sets of long-lost identical twins, and Adriana isn’t among them. Her straying husband, Antipholus of Ephesus (Ian Lassiter), is, though, and can she help it if she loves the creep and just wants him to come home?

Operatic in both anger and misery, Adriana thinks nothing of swatting their servant, Dromio of Ephesus (Aaron Bartz), with the foil reflector she uses for sunbathing, and she weeps extravagantly when her steadfast sister, Luciana (Cloteal L. Horne), reports that Antipholus came on to her. But when Luciana confesses that her smitten brother-in-law also praised her beauty — it was actually her brother-in-law’s twin, but she doesn’t know that — Adriana flies into a wounded rage.

“Didst speak him fair?” she yowls. The furious list of insults with which she proceeds to indict him is comical, ridiculous, as self-dramatizing as anything on reality TV — and sympathetic, too. Beneath all the Jersey girl trappings is a human being, not a Real Housewife, and that lends heft to a production so fizzy that it might otherwise float off into the ether.

Punctuated with bursts of pop music (Whitney Houston’s “I Have Nothing” makes a triumphant appearance) and jubilant dance (choreographed by Jesse Perez), the show moves at an almost manic pace, and the frivolity sometimes seems forced. With Mr. Lassiter doubling as Antipholus of Syracuse, and Mr. Bartz doubling as his servant, Dromio of Syracuse, these upscale boys glide into Ephesus on a yellow tandem bike and forever after reach for their hand sanitizer, repelled by their proximity to the gaudy locals with their Jersey tones.

Clad in leather clogs and earthy-chic cotton (the costumes are by Tilly Grimes), Luciana stands apart. When she and Antipholus of Syracuse touch for the first time, the connection between them is electric — a cause for horror in Luciana, who believes this is her brother-in-law. Happily for us, Ms. Horne does a very funny freakout.

Ms. Magar created a problem for herself in single-casting each pair of twins, who must meet in the climactic scene. Her solution is in keeping with the playful spirit of this 90-minute production. But she goes the hoary route in having a man, Douglas Seldin, play Luce, Adriana’s maid, an aggressively amorous woman so unattractive that she looks like a large, hairy guy. That’s the whole joke, and it’s awfully stale.

Yet much of the rest, on John McDermott’s grassy set, has the loose and friendly feel of a barbecue in the park — picnic table, busy boombox and all.